May 6 (Bloomberg) -- Giulio Andreotti, the seven-time
Italian prime minister whose legacy was marred by an indictment
for collusion with the Mafia, has died. He was 94.

He died today at his home in Rome. No cause was given.
Andreotti was hospitalized last year with heart problems
stemming from a respiratory infection.

“One of the very best people has died, someone who was
truly unique,” said Giulia Bongiorno, a lawyer and former
member of Parliament who defended Andreotti against the Mafia
accusations. “Everyone who knew him will feel a terrible
loss.”

In a political career that spanned six decades, Andreotti
came to embody the highs and lows of Italian postwar politics.
He was named a senator-for-life in 1991, before being implicated
in the so-called Clean Hands corruption investigation and prior
to standing trial for allegedly getting friends in the Sicilian
Mafia to murder a journalist who wanted to discredit him.

“Power tires those who don’t have it,” Andreotti once
said about his own endurance in Italy’s rough-and-tumble
political world.

Devout Catholic

A devout Catholic and former altar boy, Andreotti’s career
was inextricably linked to the Christian Democrats, the party
that played a role in every post-World War II government until
dissolving in July 1993 amid the Clean Hands probe. Milan
prosecutors uncovered a network of illegal party financing that
led to the demise of the Christian Democrats and Italy’s
Socialists, the other dominant party of the day.

Andreotti and the Christian Democrats helped Italy shed its
Fascist legacy and transformed an economy devastated by World
War II into one of the world’s richest industrialized nations.
During his 50-year-career, he held practically every ministerial
post.

“He was a man of faith that did great things for this
country,” Rocco Buttiglione, a former Cabinet minister and
Christian Democratic colleague of Andreotti, told SkyTG24 in an
interview.

The Clean Hands investigations decimated his party, and the
charges that he colluded with the Sicilian Mafia further tainted
his reputation, ending his lifelong ambition to wrap up his
political career as president of the republic, the only position
that had eluded him.

Worked at Vatican

Giulio Andreotti was born on Jan. 14, 1919, in Rome, as the
youngest of three children. After the death of his father,
Andreotti was raised by his mother on a state pension.

He graduated from law school and got an unusual start in
politics via the Vatican. He took a job working in the Vatican
library, where he met his mentor, Alcide de Gasperi, a Catholic
politician who worked among the holy texts while waiting for the
fall of the Fascist regime. De Gasperi took Andreotti under his
wing and made the 28-year-old an undersecretary when he became
prime minister of Italy’s first post-war government in 1947.

In the aftermath of Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship,
Italy’s new constitution created an electoral system based on
proportional representation, designed to keep any party from
accumulating too much power. The system also led to fragmented,
multiparty coalitions that fueled political instability. Italian
governments from 1948 through former Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi’s second administration that began in 2001 and ended
in 2006, have lasted an average of 10 months.

Foreign Policy

Andreotti was instrumental in shaping foreign policy,
leading Italy into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and
the United Nations and making it one of the founding members of
the European Union. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger once called Andreotti “the only Italian with a real
interest in foreign policy.”

Andreotti shared the staunch anti-communist stance adopted
by the U.S. and throughout the Cold War successfully limited the
power of the Communist Party, even as it enjoyed high levels of
popular support.

During his fourth term as prime minister in 1978, he
presided over one of the darkest chapters in modern Italian
political history, when Christian Democrat party leader and
former Prime Minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped by the terrorist
Red Brigades group. Andreotti refused to negotiate and after 55
days Moro was shot dead and later found in the trunk of a car
parked on street in central Rome.

Historic Compromise

Moro was targeted because he was one of the principal
architects of the 1976 Historic Compromise, an agreement that
gave the Communist Party an informal say in the government on
the condition they wouldn’t vote against the Christian
Democrats. Andreotti supported the move in order to bring the
Communists within the Christian Democrats’ sphere of influence.

In the end, the agreement effectively co-opted the
Communists and limited their influence at the expense of the
Christian Democrats. Initially though, the alliance polarized
Italy and angered the U.S. and even contributed to the rise of
the Red Brigades and a decade of terrorist violence by both the
right and the left known as the Years of Lead.

The Moro affair came back to haunt Andreotti. A court found
him guilty of ordering the 1979 Mafia murder of Mino Pecorelli
to stop the Sicilian journalist from publishing a book that
allegedly contained diaries Moro wrote while being held by the
Red Brigades and detailing Andreotti’s ties to organized crime
and the U.S. secret services. In 2002, at the age of 83, the
senator-for-life was sentenced to life in prison. In Oct. 2003,
Italy’s highest appeals court reversed the ruling.

Mafia Accusations

Andreotti’s career was dogged by accusations of Mafia
links. He was indicted for colluding with the Sicilian Mafia and
protecting its leaders in exchange for votes. Italy’s highest
appeals court eventually acquitted him in 2004, saying his ties
had lasted only until 1980 and the statute of limitations had
kicked in.

The Mafia was always linked to efforts to contain the
influence of the Communist Party in Italy and turned out to be a
natural ally for the Christian Democrats, whose power base
rested in Italy’s rural south and who were committed to denying
power to the Communists, according to Alexander Stille in his
book on the Mafia, “Excellent Cadavers.”

To shore up support for the party in Italy, Andreotti
enlisted the help of Salvatore Lima, the mayor of Palermo. Lima
helped deliver Sicily to the Christian Democrats to allow
Andreotti to become prime minister for the first time in 1972.

Even amid evidence that Lima had links to the Mafia,
Andreotti made him a minister in his government in 1974. Lima
was later murdered in Sicily for allegedly not using his
political ties to prevent convictions of hundreds of Mafia
bosses in the first so-called maxi trial in 1992.